A passive optical network (PON) is one system for providing network access over “the last mile”. PON may be a point-to-multipoint (P2MP) network with passive splitters positioned in an optical distribution network (ODN) to enable a single feeding fiber from a central office to serve multiple customer premises. PON may employ different wavelengths for upstream and downstream transmissions. Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) is a PON standard developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and specified in IEEE documents 802.3ah and 802.3av, both of which are incorporated herein by reference. In EPON, upstream bandwidths may be shared among multiple customer premises, whereas downstream traffic may only be broadcast. As such, there is a need in the art for mechanisms to manage downstream transmission in non-broadcast (e.g. unicast or multi-cast) mode.